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With the ongoing proliferation of new and evolving networking technologies, scholarly communication is in a process of profound transformation—what many are calling (perhaps for dramatic effect in this last year of the millennium) the "dawning of a new era." That which hardly seemed possible little more than ten years ago—scholarly collaboration on the Internet for rapid and timely exchanges of information among colleagues in different parts of the world—is now commonplace reality. New methods of communication have given rise to new forms of publication. Electronic mail and Web sites comprise everything from regional news and gossip, to tentative thoughts about research projects, to formal, peer-reviewed journals. In the realm of the Internet, all of these elements contribute, in one form or another, to the flow of scholarly communication, research and knowledge. Some of them might even be considered "serial" in nature. However, it is scholarly electronic journals in the networked environment and in relation to libraries that are the focus of this paper.

Although e-journals are a relatively recent phenomenon, they are not new. For nearly ten years, libraries in North America have been addressing issues associated with providing access to a growing body of e-journal literature. In 1991, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) published its first edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, which listed 110 titles. Ann Okerson, then Director of ARL's Office of Scholarly & Academic Publishing, predicted that in the next five years electronic journals would increase, causing "bibliographic confusion and chaos for utilities and libraries." [2] Her assessment was correct. In 1994, ARL published SPEC (Systems and Procedures Exchange Center) Kits 201 and 202 to report various ARL member libraries' experiences with e-journals. During this same year, the ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists was in its fourth edition, listing 440 electronic serials—a 350 percent growth rate since the first edition. [3]

The proliferation of e-journals continues to be phenomenal. The latest edition of Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory (37th ed. 1999) reports that, of the more than 157,000 serials listed, 10,332 are available exclusively online or in addition to a paper counterpart.[4]

The current market for e-journals and related services has exploded. As increasing numbers of print serials (including many traditional core titles and a growing range of government documents) "go electronic," some cease print publication altogether. Electronic journals are now widely recognized as a vital link in the scholarly communications chain. As a result, libraries are compelled to find the means to incorporate them into the resources they offer to support the research and curriculum needs of their communities of users.

The origins of the printed journal can be traced to two core titles that began publication in 1665: Le Journal des Scavans (later published as Le Journal des Savants) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. [5] Both are still published today. As of this writing, I was unable to confirm an electronic version for Le Journal des Savants; however Philosophical Transactions is now available electronically.[6] Thus, we see a clear example of the venerable old model for the print journal reshaping itself in the electronic realm.

The University of Vermont Task Force on Electronic Journals

Given the phenomenal growth rate of electronic journals and their potential for furthering the research mission of the institution, the University of Vermont Libraries formed an Electronic Journals Task Force in February of 1998. The Task Force was charged with:

Assembling a collection of electronic journals

Making the collection available to library users

Gathering feedback on use and level of acceptance

Task Force members agreed that content should be the most important criterion for e-journal selection, but that we could not ignore software and hardware requirements, ability to establish links between indexes and journals, licensing and legal restrictions, pricing, and the ability to track use. The Task Force had originally hoped to select e-journals based on titles found on the departmental (or subject-based) journal lists maintained by the Collection Development librarians. The following difficulties, however, made this task impossible:

Lack of availability of many titles in electronic format.

Vendors' bundling of e-journals and an inability to subscribe to individual titles.

After much deliberation, the Task Force determined that, rather than focusing on assembling a collection of electronic journals that resembles a subset of our printed collection, we would examine the current market for e-journal offerings broadly suited to the Libraries' mission for support of its academic programs.

Overview of E-Journal Offerings: The Current Market

As the great French playwright Pierre Corneille wrote in the seventeenth century, "Le temps est un grand maitre, il regle bien des choses."[8] The current market characterizes our choices. It offers an abundance of choice, much experimentation and few standards. The players include:

We are seeing more and more commercial ventures from well-known publishers such as Elsevier Science, Kluwer, Academic Press, and Springer-Verlag. Scholarly societies, such as SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and the Royal Society (publishers of Philosophical Transactions) are also making their publications available online. Project Muse, from Johns Hopkins University Press, and HighWire Press, from Stanford University, are noteworthy for their respective collections in the humanities and medical sciences, and for the close collaborative relationships they have with their university libraries.

Third Party Aggregators

Those services provide access to numerous e-journals from a variety of publishers. They include JSTOR, a nonprofit organization that offers extensive back files to more than one hundred core academic journals; and OCLC Electronic Collections Online, which offers full-text access to more than two thousand titles via their FirstSearch service. Other aggregators, such as Lexis-Nexis or Bell & Howell (formerly UMI), offer searchable indexes with links to full-text journal sources. Growing numbers of subscription agents are also working with publishers to provide aggregated services to packages of titles or to searchable full-text databases.

Noncommercial Web Sites

Collections of e-journals compiled by various groups and individuals are flourishing. Several are dedicated to providing access to titles that are offered free of charge on the Internet. They include the CIC Electronic Journals Collection [9] and la Bibliotheque Virtuelle de Periodiques [10]. Others, notably libraries, provide general "E-Journal" listings, that include titles that are offered free of charge, as well as increasing numbers of fee-based titles. For these latter, licensing restrictions and passwords limit access to users within the community served by the administrators of the site.

Selection of E-Journals

The Task Force discussed and investigated choices from all of these options and decided to develop a pilot project based on four e-journal packages: HighWire Press, Project Muse, SIAM Journals Online, and Springer-Verlag Online Journals. Titles from JSTOR and MCB University Press were subsequently added. In total, more than three hundred titles have been chosen to date.

While we attempted to select only well-established titles across a respectable range of subject areas, economics and opportunity were also driving factors. Evidently, publishers are as interested as libraries in testing the market for their electronic publications. SIAM and MCB University Press offered their complete list of e-journal titles without charge (on a trial basis) in return for the Library's subscription renewal to printed journals that we were currently receiving. Our final e-journal list gave our patrons enhanced access to our journal collections, including:

electronic access to titles that we continue to receive in print,

electronic access to new titles that we did not previously have in print format,

"renewed" access to electronic versions of titles that had previously been received in print, but had been canceled some years back, due to journal inflation and budget limitations.

E-Journals in Aggregator Databases

Although ultimately, the Task Force chose to focus on e-journals as unique and distinct entities that could be treated as such in our public catalog and Web databases, we also briefly explored the question of what to do about full-text ejournals that are linked to citation sources in aggregator databases. The Libraries subscribe to several such services—including Lexis-Nexis (Academic Universe), Repere Fulltext, and others. We discussed possibilities for alerting users to full-text journals in these sources and concluded that, since title content fluctuates regularly and often without notice, providing records for titles and linking them to the aggregator database would be a difficult task to undertake and maintain in-house. We inquired about availability of MARC records from vendors but, as of this writing, none are providing this service.

"Rather than creating a separate bibliographic record for the e-journal, we updated existing records for print journals"

At the national level, CONSER and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging have recently formed a Task Group on Journals in Aggregator Databases. They are examining ways in which libraries and vendors might work together to develop "a useful, cost-effective and timely means for providing records to identify full-text electronic journals acquired in aggregator databases." [11] Test initiatives are under way [12] and may provide useful solutions for libraries looking for a systematic means of access to full-text journals contained in aggregator databases.

Access Issues: Catalogs & Web Sites

While e-journal choices were being considered, the Task Force also explored models for providing access to the titles we would be acquiring. We reviewed Web sites, catalogs and reports at Vanderbilt University [13], Harvard University, [14], the University at Buffalo [15], the University of Pennsylvania [16], and the Research Library at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) [17]. Finally, we arrived at two choices: access from the catalog or the Web.

Web access via an alphabetical listing and/or subject index of all titles, offers a quick and simple means of inventory and direct hypertext links to full-text sources. It is particularly useful for institutions that have not implemented Web-based catalogs and cannot offer hypertext links from a catalog record. On the other hand, access to e-journals is separate from the online catalog and other journals that are part of the library's collection.

The Libraries' Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) allows for integration with other [print] journals in the collection. Web-based catalogs can enable users to connect directly to the full-text source via hypertext links in the catalog record.

We concluded that a combination of access via the Libraries' online catalog and its Web pages combines the best of both worlds in multiple forms of access. The principal disadvantage is that it may require two separate workflows for personnel who handle Web-site maintenance and those doing catalog maintenance. [18] We decided to provide access from the Libraries' OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) and from "Sage," the UVM Libraries' Web Information Gateway.

Sage had already been equipped with Inmagic software—a Web-based database-management program implemented to manage the growing number of electronic resources acquired by the Libraries. Task Force members determined that brief record entries for electronic journals should be added to Sage's "Index to Selected Electronic Resources." That would permit users to search and access e-journals by title, subject, and keyword. A series of help screens advises users about search capabilities and structure of the database.

The Task Force also determined that individual titles should be cataloged in the central Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). The Libraries had recently implemented a Web version of its NOTIS online catalog and were also in the process of preparing for migration to a new system, the Voyager online catalog. Including the publisher's Internet address in the bibliographic record would thus produce an active link from the catalog record to the full-text journal in either the NOTIS or Voyager version of our OPAC.

Cataloging guidelines were developed based on the CONSER Cataloging Manual, Module 31, Remote Access Computer File Serials. [19] We chose to use a "single record" approach. That is, rather than creating a separate bibliographic record for the e-journal, we updated existing records for print journals, when we had them, to note the existence of an electronic version and to give the URL for accessing it. To do this we added:

a 530 note, to designate the other physical format:

530 __ $a Online version available via the World Wide Web.

and an 856 field to give the Internet location:

856 41 $u http://epubs.siam.org/sam-bin/dbq/toqlist/SINUM

MARC Coding for Single Record Approach to Cataloging

Catalog Record for Printed Version updated with 530 note to designate the existence of other physical format and 856 field for URL (Internet address) to electronic versions:

In instances where the Libraries did not have print versions of the e-journal, we downloaded OCLC records for the electronic version.

Our next dilemma became the question of what "location" to assign the journals. Rather than establishing a "virtual" location for "electronic resources" or an equivalent term in our catalog, we chose to refer users to the location for the Bailey/Howe Periodicals Department. In place of shelving information or a call number, we input the phrase "Electronic Journal." The Periodicals Department provides staffing and workstations to help users successfully access journals in both print and electronic formats.

E-Journal Use and User Reactions

Early in its deliberations the Task Force identified three areas to investigate through a study of library users:

Will library users accept e-journals as a substitute for print?

What factors are important in determining e-journal use and acceptance?

As soon as e-journal records were established in the OPAC and in Sage, Task Force members began introducing these new resources to library staff. After staff had time to familiarize themselves with the titles, they were asked to fill out an evaluation form that rated each of the packages in five general performance categories; the accessibility of the journals, the navigation through the system, the output, the content, and the interface itself (including speed, aesthetics, and presentation).

That preliminary survey of staff members showed that user reactions to e-journals varied significantly. All were able to access records for the titles through the OPAC or through Sage. While most found the prospect of full-text access from the computer desktop to be exciting and full of promise, experiences in being able to access full-text sources varied. Even among the staff, some users did not have adequate computing capabilities to retrieve the full-text source from their desktops. For example, some did not have Adobe Acrobat software and could not retrieve journals available in PDF format. Others reported slow response time (perhaps attributable to Internet traffic or to slower processing units on their workstations). One user reported that the publisher's server failed while she was viewing a title. Comments about navigational capabilities, view screens and output varied across all the publishers' packages, as well as for individual e-journals. While many liked the range of navigational features for searching and retrieving text, others found them to be confusing, limited, or not well-defined, often lacking adequate help screens. Others noted differences in presentation, format and "added value" among publishers. Although they were interested and enthusiastic, most respondents conveyed that much of what they saw and experienced was very inconsistent.

"There are several movements in place that can shape any number of possible outcomes"

In December 1998, Task Force members began to publicize the Libraries' acquisition of electronic journals. Library staff began offering a series of workshops and instructional sessions to teach faculty and students how to access and navigate e-journals. Librarians are continuing to solicit feedback from faculty about e-journal use in relation to curriculum and research needs on campus.

The Systems Department has been able to track e-journal usage from Sage with statistical software that logs the number times each link is accessed or "hit" by users. The following statistics were logged for the fall quarter (September though December) of 1998:

E-Journal Usage

Project Muse Journal list

134 hits

SIAM Journals Online list

34 hits

Springer-Verlag Online Journals list

74 hits

HighWire Press list

61 hits

Electronic Journal Holdings (alphabetical list)

86 hits

Index to Selected Electronic Resources (e-journals, et al.)

2,003 hits

Statistics in this table represent only a portion of overall use. They do not include hits on individual titles accessed from Sage or from the Libraries' online catalog.

Project Muse provides a more detailed statistical analysis of UVM user activity for their e-journals for the first quarter of 1999 (January through March). These statistics indicate a healthy level of use and interest for that service—an average of twelve requests per day and a total of 1,063 overall requests for articles, images, table of contents, and other information.

Preparing for the Future

This overview covers the current climate, the current market, and various issues and concerns that we are facing in developing the necessary tools and skills to evaluate e-journals in relation to the research and curriculum needs of our faculty and students. There are a wealth of other issues—licensing considerations, pricing models, consortial arrangements—that this paper does not address. New technologies are evolving at an incredibly swift pace; the market is changing almost daily; and there are several movements in place that can shape any number of possible outcomes. As this millennium draws to a close, librarians are positioning themselves as active players in helping to shape and determine the future. Some examples of important initiatives taking place today include:

Consideration of fundamental revisions to current AACR2 cataloguing codes, including the definition of what a serial is. The serials and cataloging communities are moving to address changes brought on by the digitalization of resources in the networked environment and the ways in which catalog codes and practices may evolve to accommodate the transformation. [22], [23]

Metadata solutions such as the Dublin Core or Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) are evolving to facilitate the discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of electronic documents, these metadata elements are attracting the attention of formal resource description communities such as museums and libraries, who are experimenting with their use by mapping common elements in electronic resources to generate records for catalogs and databases. As metadata standards evolve, more refined search systems will be realized to take advantage of new search and retrieval possibilities across many different systems and platforms.

ARL initiatives including SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and NEAR, the proposal that calls for a National Electronic Article Repository. SPARC is working to forge new partnerships between libraries and publishers who are committed to developing high quality, economical alternatives to existing high-rise publications. [24] NEAR proposes the development of a publicly accessible national repository for scholarly articles published by authors in the United States. [25]

As American astronomer, Carl Sagan, wrote, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Librarians and information specialists have always done well at making sense of massive amounts of information in a variety of formats, databases and catalogs to aid our users in the discovery of what is waiting to be known. Our initial experience at the University of Vermont is teaching us that e-journals are just one more variable, another tool to learn and adapt to in aiding us with our mission to further the quest for knowledge.

Acknowledgments

This paper was made possible with the collaboration and support of numerous colleagues. Special thanks to colleagues at the University of Vermont: Nancy Crane, Trina Magi, William Dunlop, Lyman Ross, Mara Saule, and Elizabeth Dow—and also to Ann Ercelawn at Vanderbilt University—for their help and advice in gathering information and perspectives. Thanks, too, to colleagues at NASIG (the North American Serials Interest Group) who have provided me with contacts, support and resources to turn to over the years, as well an appreciation for the many intricacies and challenges in working with serials and understanding their role in the scholarly information chain. Special thanks to Martin Gordon at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and to the NASIG Continuing Education Committee for their encouragement and willingness to support this research as part of NASIG's continuing educational outreach effort.

Birdie MacLennan is Library Associate Professor and Coordinator of Serials and Cataloging at the Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont. In 1990 she founded the SERIALST Internet discussion forum in order to create an informal cyber-venue for networking and conversing about various aspects of serials-related concerns in libraries. As listowner and moderator, she continues to maintain this forum for an international constituency of librarians, publishers, vendors and other interested "serialists." Her professional interests include the role of new technologies and electronic communication by rapport to serial publications and librarianship. She holds an M.S. from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston. In recent years, she has developed a passion for learning French and for travelling throughout Québec province in search of the bonheur. You may contact her by email at bmaclenn@zoo.uvm.edu.

5. There are several sources that cite the 17th century and le Journal des sçavans and Philosophical Transactions as the starting points for printed journals as we know them today. These titles were among the first to publish scholarly research in a manner intended to appeal to a broad reading public. See Jim Parrott in "Scholarly Societies as Meeting Sponsors and Publishers," University of Waterloo Electronic Library Scholarly Societies Project (March 1996), a WWW Document: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/meetings_publishers.html. For historical perspective on the role scholarly societies played in developing journals as a means of communicating research, Parrott recommends: Martha Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928.

9. The CIC E-Journals Collection (Committee for Institutional Cooperation), is managed by the consortium known as the "Big 10" research libraries in the Midwest region of the U.S. They systematically catalog and archive freely accessible Internet titles that collection specialists have chosen as relevant to their academic community. WWW Document, accessed Apr. 28, 1999 : [formerly http://ejournals.cic.net/]

10. La Bibliotheque Virtuelle de Periodiques, a collaborative project between librarians and documentalistes in France and Quebec, offers a directory of freely accessible, scholarly French-language periodicals, that includes a search engine and subject listing arranged by Dewey classification category. WWW Document: http://biblio.ntic.org/biblio/

12. John Riemer reported test initiatives at the University of Tennessee and the University of Illinois, Chicago in an e-mail message to the AGGREGATOR-L discussion list (Mar. 19, 1999). E-mail message forwarded from John Riemer to Birdie MacLennan, Mar. 24, 1999.

15. University at Buffalo, University Libraries. "Electronic Journals in the UB Catalog and on the Libraries' Web Site: General Statement of Policy." September 1996. WWW Document: [formerly http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/cts/policies/ejrnl.html]

16. The University of Pennsylvania provides alphabetical and subject access to Electronic Journals via their Web site at: [formerly http://proxy.library.upenn.edu/login] as well as through their online public catalog: http://www.franklin.library.upenn.edu/

22. See Conference Papers from the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR [Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules]. Toronto, Canada, October 23-25, 1997. WWW Document: [formerly http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/confpap.htm]